All fabric, all the time!

April 12, 2012

An exciting quilt project! (AKA TOOT TOOT!)

Hi everyone,

I recently did a quilting project that I'm super excited about, and I hope you'll agree! Have you heard of Dear Stella? They're a new-ish fabric company that's a division of Timeless Treasures, and their fabric is geared toward the more contemporary, fashion-forward quilter. (If you read my post about Fall Quilt Market 2011 you'll see a picture of their cool booth!) ANYWAY, earlier this year I heard from a friend of mine that they were looking for pattern testers. I didn't really know what that meant, but I knew I wanted to do it! So I contacted them and submitted some photos of my quilts. Apparently they liked what they saw, because they hired me to make a quilt for them!

It was pretty cool to be involved with Dear Stella on this project. I was asked to recreate a quilt from a picture the Dear Stella team had found, so I didn't have an actual pattern to go from. Luckily, it was a fairly simple design, which was perfect for the gorgeous fabrics! Before the fabric was available, I got an email with a PDF of the line I would be using. It had not been released yet, since it's a new line, so I was asked not to share it! (Which I did not - I know what side my bread is buttered on.) It was hard though, it was such a pretty collection. Finally, Dear Stella got the fabric from the mill and sent it to me - what a great box to open!

So, let's take a look! Here is the quilt I made for Dear Stella using their new collection Maasai Mara.

Wowzers! (Does that sound like I'm tooting my own horn too much? Well, too bad - TOOT TOOT!) So, to give you some deets, each circle is 15" square. Each circle is made up of four quadrants, which is actually a Drunkard's Path block. I made the solid sections of the block a little bigger than necessary, then once each circle was sewn together, I trimmed them down to the right size. If I was going to do this again, I think I would leave more space between each circle, since there were a lot of seams coming together where the circles meet up - it was a little tricky to sew.

Also - TOOT TOOT! Yep, I'm doing it again, but come on - look how good the corners of the gray and white solid sections match up! That is something I usually have a hard time with, but I really took my time on this to get it right. You can also see more of the quilting here - I decided to keep it super simple to really show off the fabrics. I just quilted half an inch on each side of the straight seams.

This picture shows more of the beautiful fabrics - I already love blue and green anyway, and the ikat designs are so fresh and fun, I just couldn't stop looking at it!

Here's a picture that shows more of the border and binding fabric. Again, I love these colors! The aqua border fabric was the prettiest shade of blue (it's the color of my bathroom!). And the royal blue binding was just the right choice to finish the quilt. You can also see a bit of the absolutely gorgeous backing fabric too! More on that in a bit.

And here's the back! I adore this beautiful tile-like fabric, it just makes me want to go on a beach vacation! This quilt is a tropical paradise in fabric form.

So, that's my big brush with a BIG CITY fabric design company! It was kind of hard for me to send the quilt back to Dear Stella, since I got pretty attached to it. If you're going to Spring Quilt Market in Kansas City, look for it! It should be on display with more no-doubt awesome projects made with their other fabric collections. (I've also seen a sneak peek of the other Spring Dear Stella lines and they're great! Quilt Sandwich has some on order, so not to worry - we'll let you know when it comes in!)